Sam Walter Foss was a poet of gentle heart.  His keen wit never had any sting.  He has described our Yankee folk with as clever humour as Bret Harte delineated Rocky Mountain life.  Like Harte, Mr. Foss had no unkindness in his make-up.  He told me that he never had received an anonymous letter in his life.

Our American nation is wonderful in science and mechanical invention.  It was the aim of Sam Walter Foss to immortalize the age of steel.  “Harness all your rivers above the cataracts’ brink, and then unharness man.”  He told me he thought the subject of mechanics was as poetical as the song of the lark.  “The Cosmos wrought for a billion years to make glad for a day,” reminds us of the most resonant periods of Tennyson.

“The House by the Side of the Road,” is from a text of Homer.  “The Lunkhead” shows Foss in his happiest mood:  gently satirizing the foibles and harmless, foolish fancies of his fellow-men.  There is a haunting misty tenderness in such a poem as “The Tree Lover.”

“Who loves a tree he loves the life
That springs in flower and clover;
He loves the love that gilds the cloud,
And greens the April sod;
He loves the wide beneficence,
His soul takes hold of God.”

We have too little love for the tender out-of-door nature.  “The
world is too much with us.”

It was a loss to American life and letters when Sam Walter Foss
passed away from us at the height of his strong true manhood. 
Later he will be regarded as an eminent American.

He was true to our age to the core.  Whether he wrote of the gentle McKinley, the fighting Dewey, the ludicrous schoolboy, the “grand eternal fellows” that are coming to this world after we have left it—­he was ever a weaver at the loom of highest thought.  The world is not to be civilized and redeemed by the apostles of steel and brute force.  Not the Hannibals and Caesars and Kaisers but the Shelleys, the Scotts, and the Fosses are our saviours.  They will have a large part in the future of the world to heighten and brighten life and justify the ways of God to men.

These and such as these are our consolation in life’s thorny pathway.  They keep alive in us the memory of our youth and many a jaded traveller as he listens to their music, sees again the apple blossoms falling around him in the twilight of some unforgotten spring.

PETER MacQUEEN.

Peter MacQueen was brought to my house years ago by a friend when he happened to be stationary for an hour, and he is certainly a unique and interesting character, a marvellous talker, reciter of Scotch ballads, a maker of epigrams, and a most unpractical, now-you-see-him and now-he’s-a-far-away-fellow.  I remember his remark, “Breakfast is a fatal habit.”  It was not the breakfast to which he referred but to the gathering round a table at a stated hour, far too early, when not in a mood for society or for conversation.  And again:  “I have decided never to marry.  A poor girl is a burden; a rich girl a boss.”  But you never can tell.  He is now a Benedict.